How to use optical discs
Passthrough reading and recording (a.k.a., “burning”) are not supported by Qubes OS. This is not a limitation of Xen, which provides scsiback and scsifront drivers, but of Qubes OS. It will be fixed in the future.
Currently, the only options for reading and recording optical discs (e.g., CDs, DVDs, BRDs) in Qubes are:
- Use a USB optical drive.
- Attach a SATA optical drive to a secondary SATA controller, then assign this secondary SATA controller to a VM.
- Use a SATA optical drive attached to dom0. (Caution: This option is potentially dangerous.)
To access an optical disc via USB follow the typical procedure for attaching a USB device, then check with the Qubes Devices widget to see what device in the target qube the USB optical drive was attached to.
Typically this would be sr0.
For example, if sys-usb has device 3-2 attached to the work qube’s sr0, you would mount it with mount /dev/sr0 /mnt/removable.
You could also write to a disc with wodim -v dev=/dev/sr0 -eject /home/user/Qubes.iso.